Support

Quisk on Windows

Quisk now runs on Windows XP and Windows 7. The new Windows
Quisk installs
easily from a quisk.msi installer file, and adds its menu items under
Start/Programs. You must install a 32-bit version of Python 2.7
and wxPython before
you install Quisk. You must use the 32-bit version even if you
have 64-bit Windows because the Quisk extension module is 32-bit.
Quisk installs itself as a package under
site-packages under Python 2.7. To uninstall Quisk, use Control
Panel/ Add Remove Programs. You may need to
adjust the config file parameters data_poll_usec and latency_millisecs
depending on your hardware.

Before installing Windows Quisk, first think about whether you
really want to do that. Quisk is a simple SDR program meant for
experimenters and homebrewers. It doesn't have all the features
of PowerSDR, and it has no menus to adjust its parameters; you must
edit a config file to even change the sample rate. But you can
easily write your own Python code to control its behavior, and I find
it more than adequate to run my station.

What is Quisk?

This is QUISK, a Software Defined Radio (SDR). QUISK is
the software that controls my receiver and transmitter. QUISK
rhymes with "brisk", and is QSK plus a few letters to make it
easier to pronounce. QSK is a Q signal meaning full breakin CW, and
QUISK has been designed for low latency CW operation. It works
fine for SSB and AM too. QUISK is written in Python and C, and
all source is included so you
can change it yourself.

It currently runs under Linux using ALSA sound drivers or
PortAudio and
offers these capabilities:

Quisk can control the HiQSDR.

As a receiver it can use the SDR-IQ by RfSpace as a sample
source. There are several decimation rates available. The
screen shots below were taken using the SDR-IQ. The QUISK
receiver will read the sample data, tune
it, filter it, demodulate it, and send the audio to the sound card
for output to external headphones or speakers.

As a receiver it can use your soundcard as a sample
source. You supply a complex (I/Q) mixer to convert radio
spectrum to a low IF,
and send that IF to the left and right inputs of the sound card in your
computer. The demodulated audio goes to the same soundcard for
output.

As a transmitter it can accept microphone input and send that to
your transmitter for SSB operation. For CW, QUISK can mute the
audio and
substitute a side
tone. Quisk can send transmit data to your sound card for use
with SoftRock or similar. If you are not using SoftRock
hardware and not using Ethernet, then you can modify the C
code in microphone.c to connect to your hardware.

If you have the SDR-IQ or the Softrock hardware, then QUISK is
ready for you to use as a receiver. If you have other receive
hardware, then you will need to change the file quisk_hardware.py to
connect your receiver to QUISK. For example, if you change your
VFO frequency with a serial port, then you need to change
quisk_hardware.py to send characters to the serial port. The file
quisk_hardware.py is written in the Python programming language, a very
easy language to learn and use.

I have tried to make QUISK easy to modify so it can be used for
hardware other than my own. See the packages by
Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. WA5ZNU on http://pypi.python.org.

To install QUISK, download it from the links above.
Then read the documentation
and
the help.html file for
further instructions. Quisk can be installed with distutils,
easy_install, or you can just use the tarball. Just unpacking the
tarball is best if you plan to add files or modify Quisk. The
list of recent
changes is
in CHANGELOG.txt.

Here are some screen shots of QUISK. The usual graph and
waterfall display are available. I dislike radios that look like
computer programs so I designed QUISK without menus and with lots of
buttons (a personality quirk of mine I guess). Hopefully QUISK
looks like a radio and it is obvious how to use it. The
red/yellow/blue bars at the bottom of the graph are the band
plan. They mark the CW/SSB parts of the band, and show the ARRL
additions. The yellow is the data part of the CW segment.
The band plan and colors are in the configuration file quisk_conf.py so
you can change it.